Thursday, November 8, 2012

Every time you launch Chrome, you see the same simple browser window. What you may not know is that things are changing under the hood every six weeks, thanks to auto-update. It’s like a mechanic stopping by every six weeks to give your car a new engine.

With today’s Chrome Beta channel release, Chrome continues to get faster, as you can see in this chart which shows Octane scores. Octane is a JavaScript benchmark we designed to measure performance of real-world applications on the modern web. Stability sometimes takes higher priority, but we’re still manic about improving Chrome’s speed: on Octane, we saw an overall improvement of more than 26% over the last year.

Speed isn't just about JavaScript performance, so in other areas of Chrome, we strive to minimize wait times. For example, we recently made some server-side changes to Google Cloud Print so that Chrome’s printer selection dialog loads twice as fast. We’ve also been working on reducing the browser’s startup time, and setting up automated tests to catch any code changes that would slow Chrome down.

Speed is one of our core principles, so rest assured we’ll continue to make Chrome faster in every way possible.